Standards – The Opposing View

Eric posted yesterday looking at why the adoption of standards can be a bad thing. Rather than discussing his post in the context of the recent Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum debacle (I’m sure calling it a debacle will get people from both sides of the divide fired up – but you have to admit it was messy), I thought I’d bring it back to easy stuff – business outcomes.

I met yesterday with a Silicon Valley start-up that’s looking to do some really cool stuff in the business process automation space (I’ll post about their particular offering in a couple of weeks). It’s a great offering but only neccessary because we live in a standards-less world (well my small part of the world anyway).

It’s for this reason that Martin Kleppmann’s recent OAccounts initiaitve was so appealing – I see it as enabling both application migrations, and data interchange. If you like OAccounts could be the standard that sees a behemoth like EDI rendered unnecessary for small business.

I understand Eric’s points about impending standards being the justification for slowing down adoption at an enterprise level but in my experience small business doesn’t work this way – rather small business would embrace a forthcoming standard seeing the efficiency gains that it could bring to them. I know in the small world that I pay lots of attention to, accounting software, standards would increase uptake markedly as prospective customers would see just what connected on demand applications can do to their efficiency.

So I’ve got to disagree with you on this one Eric – standardization? Bring it on!